How reduce build time of the project?

[ganesh dp]

IDE : vc 6.0 I want reduce my project build time, project is quite big one. Is there any way?

[Sauro Viti]

You can use precompiled headers (however this option is enabled by default). After that, move all the includes to files that doesn't change frequently (e.g. windows.h, math.h and so on) into the header file used to build the precompiled header (usually stdafx.h).

[Maximilien]

ganesh.dp wrote:

project is quite big one.

What is big ? Check for superfluous #include directives, check for badly coupled files (again, #include) dependencies. If all looks ok, then check to see if you need to rebuild everything everytime. (are there some libraries/dll than can be build once in while ? instead of everytime ?) If all else fails, have a look at distributed build system (xoreax[^] comes to mind, and it still support VC6). M.

Watched code never compiles.

[Abhi Lahare]

If the code resides on network drive, its take a huge time

[Aescleal]

There's loads of ways to speed up build time by writing your source code to build fast: - The main one is reduce dependencies between compilation units. Don't include things that you can get away with forward declaring and don't do daft things like have single include files with global lists of error codes - Use interfaces and parameterise from above (PFA) to decouple class implementations from each other - Use PIMPLs to hide implementation details of classes. Don't use protected or private member functions in your base classes - Use DLLs and libraries to help you reduce dependencies and DLLs to reduce link time - (Controversial) Don't use precompiled headers, or if you must only include stuff that's not going to change (standard library headers, third party library headers e.g. boost headers, windows headers). Hiding OS interfaces under portable ones will help speed up your builds as using portable interfaces don't require dragging in loads of OS headers Generally if you're talking less than a second on average to compile each source file and less than 10 seconds for a link there's probably not a lot of reason to try and speed things up more. Another option would be to invest in a newer compiler - VC++2010 has loads of advantages for building over VC6 even if you don't care about the other things like standards compliance and C++0x features. Have a look in "Exceptional C++" by Herb Sutter and "Large Scale C++ Design" by John Lakos for more ideas along these lines. Cheers, Ash